Mike's Mets - Depth Isn't a Four-Letter Word

 

By Mike Steffanos December 20, 2020 

Although anything certainly can happen, we're probably not going to see a big flurry of moves in baseball over the next two weeks. The Mets have made some progress in signing depth pieces, while also adding Trevor May to the bullpen and inking James McCann to a four year deal. Getting Jared Porter into the fold as their new General Manager was important for this offseason and for the future. They still have a lot left on their to-do list, however. If they went into battle with the players already under contract, you'd probably be looking at a .500 baseball team, and that would be dependent on key players staying mostly healthy. Of course, we'd all bet the farm that major additions are still coming, and we would be pretty disappointed in 2021 if the Mets weren't at least strongly competitive for a playoff spot.

Competing next year is going to involve the Mets adding at least one good starting pitcher for their rotation and, most likely, a starting position player. It's unlikely that they will shop in the luxury aisle for both of those players. If they decide to sign Trevor Bauer to bolster their rotation they will likely sign a position player from the second tier options, such as inking Jackie Bradley, Jr. to play CF. If they sign George Springer, Jake Odorizzi is probably the high end of who they might target for the rotation. Like I wrote yesterday, it seems likely that making a trade for Nolan Arenado would preclude going after Springer or Bauer.

I don't claim to have any inside information on Steve Cohen's thinking, but he did talk about winning the right way and building something sustainable. He also spoke specifically about not wanting to saddle the Mets with a bunch of big contracts of players who were past their prime a few years down the road. There was also that specific mention of not spending like a drunken sailor. The sum total of all these things would argue against multiple big money additions.

I was catching up on some of the reading that I didn't have the time to give full justice to last week. One of the ironies of spending time blogging is that it takes away from reading time, but I still have to try to read as much as I can from quality sources if I hope to write at all intelligently in this space. I only had time to skim Tim Britton's excellent piece in The Athletic last week on new Mets GM Jared Porter, so I put it aside to delve into more deeply this weekend.

New GM Jared Porter spent a lot of time talking about depth at his press conference, but not in the manner that the Mets used to do depth under Wilpon management. When the Mets in previous years have had to reach beyond their 25-man roster because of injuries, it usually involved bringing up players who were unlikely to provide much in the way of help, as Britton pointed out:

For the last several years, even going back to the end of Alderson's tenure as general manager, the Mets were shallower in Triple A than a kiddie pool. When call-ups were needed, New York trotted out outfielders like Travis Taijeron, Matt den Dekker, Austin Jackson and Kevin Kaczmarski. They played José Bautista and Jack Reinheimer on the infield. They started Adam Wilk and Tyler Pill, Wilmer Font and Ariel Jurado. In 2020’s 60-game season, they converted two relievers to the rotation on the fly.

That's not something I blame any of the recent Mets regimes for, whether it was Minaya, Alderson or the late, mostly unlamented Brodie Van Wagenen. They had major challenges with the resources they were handed in building an adequate 25-man roster. The bench too often offered little flexibility to Mets managers, and the lack of quality depth in the bullpen often forced them to over-rely on their best relievers in games they hoped to win.

I think roster depth has taken on a negative connotation for Mets fans because it has come to signal a bunch of Quad-A talent and relievers like Paul Sewald who consistently failed to get major league hitters out. What little depth the Mets did manage to build, particularly in pitching, was often squandered by Van Wagenen's clumsy handling of the roster. But if sustained success is to be more than just a meaningless slogan here, a different kind of depth and a better handling of that depth will be required.

Britton quoted Porter on how the new Mets GM defined depth:

"It's really important to create a situation where you're a really hard team to play against. You're hard to game plan against in all areas. Over the course of 162 games, a lot comes up. There's ups, there’s downs — players go into slumps, pitchers get hurt. Having a setup where it’s really hard for teams to prepare against you because you have a good layout and players coming behind them is critical. That's something we can attack right away."

As Britton noted, Porter differentiates between depth and "quality depth", basically the difference between the type of cannon fodder the Mets used to stockpile and players that can come up and help a team bridge the gap when a player goes down for a while. Sadly, we Mets fans are all too familiar with a promising season going down in flames after the Mets were forced to tap into their inadequate reinforcements.

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